Anger Test

Anger is not the problem

Worth establishing first, because most writing on this treats the feeling itself as the pathology.

Anger is a normal signal. It generally means that something is wrong, a boundary has been crossed, or something you care about is under threat, and people who never get angry are frequently not calm — they are failing to register things that should register.

What predicts damage is not how often you feel angry. It is what you do while angry, which is why this test separates the feeling, the expression, the suppression and the interpretation underneath.

That separation is also good news. It means you are not being asked to feel differently, which is difficult and slow. You are being asked to behave differently while feeling the same thing, which is narrower and considerably more achievable.

Venting does not work

One of the better-replicated findings in this area, and it contradicts advice that is still given constantly.

The catharsis idea — that anger builds up and needs discharging, through hitting something, shouting, or a session of describing how furious you are — has been tested repeatedly. It reliably makes people more angry, not less. Expressing anger aggressively rehearses it: it strengthens the association, keeps the physiological arousal high, and makes the next episode more likely.

Punching a pillow does not empty a reservoir. There is no reservoir.

What does reduce anger is unglamorous: physically leaving for twenty minutes, letting the arousal come down before saying anything, and returning. Not suppressing — postponing, with an explicit intention to come back to the subject.

Holding it in is not the alternative

The other half of the same misunderstanding.

Suppression is frequently mistaken for self-control, and it is a distinct strategy with its own costs. Held anger does not dissipate; it accumulates and gets expressed later, either sideways — sarcasm, coldness, silence — or all at once in a way that is wildly disproportionate to whatever triggered it, because it is answering eighteen months of arithmetic that the other person knows nothing about.

So there are three options rather than two, and only one of them works: express it damagingly, hold it, or state it plainly while it is small. The third one is the skill, and it is a skill rather than a temperament.

The interpretation is upstream of everything

The most useful and least obvious scale here.

Anger does not follow from an event. It follows from an interpretation of an event. The driver who cut in front was either rude to you or distracted, and the same physical occurrence produces fury or nothing depending entirely on which version you are running.

People with a hostile attributional habit — a tendency to read intent into ambiguous behaviour — get angry more often, not because they are more temperamental, but because they are living in a world where more things are deliberate.

This is the most changeable thing on this page, and the practice is specific: before reacting, generate one alternative explanation. It does not have to be generous or even likely. Producing a second possibility is enough to interrupt the certainty that the anger was built on.

When anger is a symptom of something else

Worth checking before treating anger as the primary problem.

Persistent irritability is one of the most common presentations of depression, particularly in men, where low mood shows up as being short with everyone rather than as sadness. Chronic pain, poor sleep, alcohol, some medications, and untreated attention difficulties all produce it too.

If your anger is new, or has grown noticeably over a year or two, that is worth a doctor’s appointment before it is worth an anger management course.

About the items

The facets follow the standard separation of trait anger, outward expression, inward suppression and hostile attribution, with a cost scale to distinguish temperament from problem. The statements are written for this test rather than reproduced from a copyrighted inventory.

The free run takes the first five statements of each facet, giving you a real reading on all five rather than a precise reading on two.

If anybody has told you they are frightened of your anger, please treat that as more important than anything on this page. Help for this exists, has reasonable evidence behind it, and works better than continuing does.